Finding Win-Win Solutions When Assessing Ecosystem Service Trade-Offs

A central challenge for natural resource management is developing rigorous, explicit and practical approaches for evaluating tradeoffs among diverse human uses of ecosystems. This issue is particularly salient for marine ecosystems, which are facing an ever increasing number of uses and threats. Growing pressures on marine systems are fortunately being met with policy opportunities to reform ocean management, including a surge of interest in Marine Spatial Planning. To date, marine management has typically dealt with tradeoffs implicitly, without fully acknowledging who wins and loses, or has ignored the tradeoffs altogether, for example if the nature and extent of the tradeoffs are not known or difficult to calculate. However, the basis for more explicit and quantitative assessments of tradeoffs can be found in economic theory focused on identifying efficient outcomes that balance the return among assets. While there has been progress applying these ideas to terrestrial management, marine systems lack similar developments. This translation requires some innovations given unique challenges associated with the management of marine systems, including the typical absence of property rights in the oceans, the lack of markets for many important marine ecosystem services, traditionally fragmented governance, and many important emerging ocean uses. We will present the conceptual underpinnings of an analytical approach for explicitly examining tradeoffs among multiple ecosystem services that builds on basic theory from economics. The framework is flexible in that services can be quantified using any metric and it can be applied to any number of potentially interacting services. We will highlight the key insights that can be gained from using this approach including revealing inferior management options, demonstrating the costs of using single sector management when there are important interactions among services, and identifying ‘compatible’ services that provide win-win management options. We will illustrate how this approach can be applied to examining tradeoffs between fisheries and conservation, among wave energy, fisheries and coastal development, and more generally how it can be instrumental in advancing comprehensive ocean management.